Did he know E.T.A. Hoffmann? (1 Viewer)

I remember, when I first read 'PULP'. the strangeness of the alien- and Lady-Death-topic reminded me a bit of the German romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann.
This goes even more for the classic doppelganger-motif in 'THE OTHER', which to my knowledge he had written around the same time as 'Pulp'.
But I didn't really believe, that Bukowski had actually read Hoffmann. It's not his sort of literature.

Today I found a poem in 'ON LOVE' ('we get along', p.140f), where he's talking about his "machine", obviously meaning his beloved typer, at the end reveiling, that it's an 'Olympia', by telling, that's "her"[!] "name"[!].

This is definitely a nod to Hoffmann's story 'THE SANDMAN', where there is an artificial girl, a machine, named Olympia.

(He would not neccessarily need to have read the story itself. Given his love for classical music, he could as well have heared about the idea from the opera 'Les Contes d’Hoffmann' by Jacques Offenbach on the radio.)

Now I seriously wonder, if we have any evidence from letters, interviews, works, etc that Bukowski did know about Hoffmann and maybe had read him.

According to our database, he last used his Olympia in 1983. Maybe cirerita can confirm or deny this as the date of the manuscript in 'On Love'.
Do we have an exact date for 'The Other'? David?
Anybody?
 
Roni, when I read this your reference to Hoffmann rang a bell and I vaguely remembered I had looked this up at one point and eureka I actually wrote about this in my Buk biography. Here it is--in reference to the story "Murder" or "The Blanket" and the idea of "Tuecke des Objekts"...See second paragraph, p. 68.

Hoffmann.jpg
 

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